re: Hospital overload in Louisiana is it COVID or is it pent up elective surgery demand?

I have a family member that is a RN at OLOL. She said it’s a staffing shortage and nurses are out with Covid or mandatory quarantines.

Maybe they got sloppy with PPE’s when things got better? Or, like another poster said, got laid off when electives weren’t taking place.

quote:

---

So, it's another lie. They're not running out of physical capacity, just capacity that staff can handle.

---

Yep. She had covid early on, so they are working her like a dog.

I also heard, unconfirmed, that Texas is offering insane salaries right now. Locals may be taking advantage.

Read his post - shortage of staff is the limiting factor.

Physical capacity is not the issue. It’s operational capacity. You can have 5,000 physical rooms/beds, but if you don’t have properly trained staff available to operate then you don’t operational capacity if 5,000. That is why the military medical staff are being deployed to hospitals. They are being used to increase operational capacity.

No I get that, but it doesn't really matter why the hospitals are at full capacity, just that they are.

quote:

---

Except we are being told they are full which is not the same at at capacity
We are also being led to believe that they are full of people with Covid only

---

It’s a combination of factors. Trying to drill down to one specific cause across the entire state is an exercise in futility. Other than to generally say that you can “blame COVID” in the sense that it mostly traces back to COVID in one way or another.

In BR, I know there is a combination of:
- People who have put off making appointments for months because they didn’t want to be around COVID (or because facilities were prioritizing COVID) and are now requiring hospitalization.
- Backlog of non-emergent procedures that were postponed.
- Segregation of beds/units to separate COVID patients from non-COVID patients. For example, hospitals have a COVID ICU and a clean ICU, or a COVID med-surg and a clean med-surg. This causes a ton of logistical issues from staffing to bed allocation. If a hospital has 10 available ICU beds, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have 10 beds for COVID patients or 10 beds for non-COVID patients.
- Lack of critical care nurses due to the logistical issues mentioned above, nurses under quarantine with COVID, nurses who have taken lucrative travel assignments in the past couple of months, etc.

I posted this in a previous thread on the subject, but I know for a fact that one BR area hospital is currently paying $30/hr in incentives for ICU nurses. This doesn’t happen unless there’s a legit need. I also know for a fact that, as of a few days ago, neither OLOL nor BRG were accepting transfers.

quote:

---

No I get that, but it doesn't really matter why the hospitals are at full capacity, just that they are.

---

The hospitals are INTENTIONALLY lowering their capacity to what is needed. The media is reporting that as though we have a capacity problem. We don’t. All they have to do to increase capacity is work their nurses more and bring back those who are laid off.

Hospitals are doing what any business would; they are lowering their costs to what is necessary at the moment.

I asked this in another thread, what would it take (how much training) to transform the nurses that aren’t being taxed right now, namely surgical nurses, to increase the capacity in ICU’s? I’m not saying make them ICU nurses but allow them to assist ICU nurses as a force multiplier?